New study makes worrying findings about premarital promiscuity and divorce

Premarital intercourse is a really good predictor of divorce but researchers have never really understood why too much love-making before marriage often results in breakups, at least until now. 

Previous theories credited traditional relationship values and different factors like one’s beliefs and values as prime candidates for an explanation but these theories have never been tested, and that’s why a group of researchers decided to find out if they mattered. 

Specifically, the researchers wanted to know if the number of sexual partners a person had before marriage played a role in divorce and whether that role differed by gender or if it was universal across all relationships. 

This question of how many previous partners affect future relationships might seem like a difficult question to answer but the researchers set up an ingenious method of looking at the known data and were able to put together three groups of informative information. 

Pulling three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the researchers were able to get information on a range of age cohorts across several decades that came complete with a range of advantages and disadvantages.

For example, the wave of data was larger and more representative than the other two waves and it contained longer observational data on marriages as well as better examinations of the early life of the respondents. 

In contrast, the second wave of data was a smaller sample size but had a more in-depth analysis of a person’s partners before marriage. However, by combining the two groups in addition with the third, the researchers were able to make more accurate conclusions. 

“This allows for greater approximation of the number of premarital partners needed in order to examine the shape of the association between sexual history and divorce risk,” the researchers wrote in their study—and the findings they drew were quite interesting. 

The researchers discovered that the relationship between premarital intercourse and divorce was “significant and robust” when accounting for early life factors and found that they could pinpoint a number at which people would suffer higher risks of future divorce. 

“Compared to people with no premarital partners other than eventual spouses, those with nine or more partners exhibit the highest divorce risk, followed by those with one to eight partners,” the researchers wrote in their study. 

“Those with one to eight partners are also at greater risk of divorce,” the study’s authors noted, “though this coefficient is weaker than for those with nine or more partners.” The odds for those with 8 premarital partners were 64% higher than those with no partners. 

People with the lowest risk of a future divorce had no previous premarital partners or non-spousal relationships, which indicated there was a very real relationship between the number of partners one had before marriage and the future possibility of divorce. 

These results held true across all genders and the researchers found no evidence that premarital male and female relationships had varying outcomes in divorce risks, which is an interesting finding considering the varying views on promiscuity in Western culture.  

“This is a surprising finding,” the study’s authors reported, “the domains of sexuality and marriage are highly gendered,” adding that previous research showed “many plausible theoretical pathways” by which we might expect divorce risks to differ between genders. 

The study was published in the Journal of Family Issues and also contained a number of other novel discoveries about each wave of data they examined, including the finding that those who married for the first time later in life divorced about 10% of the time. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that roughly 21% of marriages had ended in divorce among the three ways of data they analyzed, and an overwhelming majority of people (84%) reported having had premarital or non-spousal relationships.